Ramblings from the dark side of the moon

Winds of Change. One of my favourite songs ever and one that comes to my mind now that me and my family are going through quite some important changes, once again. But let’s start from the beginning…

A few years ago, back in January 2013, my family and me moved to the UK as the result of my decision to leave Igalia after almost 7 years in the company to embark ourselves in the “adventure” or living abroad. This was an idea we had been thinking about for a while already at that time, and our current situation back then suggested that it could be the right moment to try it out… so we did.

It was kind of a long process though: I first arrived alone in January to make sure I would have time to figure things out and find a permanent place for us to live in, and then my family joined me later in May, once everything was ready. Not great, if you ask me, to be living separated from your loved ones for 4 full months, not to mention the juggling my wife had to do during that time to combine her job with looking after the kids mostly on her own… but we managed to see each other every 2-3 weekends thanks to the London – Coruña direct flights in the meantime, so at least it was bearable from that point of view.

But despite of those not so great (yet expected) beginnings, I have to say that this past 5+ years have been an incredible experience overall, and we don’t have a single regret about making the decision to move, maybe just a few minor and punctual things only if I’m completely honest, but that’s about it. For instance, it’s been just beyond incredible and satisfying to see my kids develop their English skills “from zero to hero”, settle at their school, make new friends and, in one word, evolve during these past years. And that alone would have been a good reason to justify the move already, but it turns out we also have plenty of other reasons as we all have evolved and enjoyed the ride quite a lot as well, made many new friends, knew many new places, worked on different things… a truly enriching experience indeed!

In a way, I confess that this could easily be one of those things we’d probably have never done if we knew in advance of all the things we’d have to do and go through along the way, so I’m very grateful for that naive ignorance, since that’s probably how we found the courage, energy and time to do it. And looking backwards, it seems clear to me that it was the right time to do it.

But now it’s 2018 and, even though we had such a great time here both from personal and work-related perspectives, we have decided that it’s time for us to come back to Galicia (Spain), and try to continue our vital journey right from there, in our homeland.

And before you ask… no, this is notbecause of Brexit. I recognize that the result of the referendum has been a “contributing factor” (we surely didn’t think as much about returning to Spain before that 23 of June, that’s true), but there were more factors contributing to that decision, which somehow have aligned all together to tell us, very clearly, that Now It’s The Time…

For instance, we always knew that we would eventually move back for my wife to take over the family business, and also that we’d rather make the move in a way that it would be not too bad for our kids when it happened. And having a 6yo and a 9yo already it feels to us like now it’s the perfect time, since they’re already native English speakers (achievement unlocked!) and we believe that staying any longer would only make it harder for them, especially for my 9yo, because it’s never easy to leave your school, friends and place you call home behind when you’re a kid (and I know that very well, as I went through that painful experience precisely when I was 9).

Besides that, I’ve also recently decided to leave Endless after 4 years in the company and so it looks like, once again, moving back home would fit nicely with that work-related change, for several reasons. Now, I don’t want to enter into much detail on why exactly I decided to leave Endless, so I think I’ll summarize it as me needing a change and a rest after these past years working on Endless OS, which has been an equally awesome and intense experience as you can imagine. If anything, I’d just want to be clear on that contributing to such a meaningful project surrounded by such a team of great human beings, was an experience I couldn’t be happier and prouder about, so you can be certain it was not an easy decision to make.

Actually, quite the opposite: a pretty hard one I’d say… but a nice “side effect” of that decision, though, is that leaving at this precise moment would allow me to focus on the relocation in a more organized way as well as to spend some quality time with my family before leaving the UK. Besides, it will hopefully be also useful for us to have enough time, once in Spain, to re-organize our lives there, settle properly and even have some extra weeks of true holidays before the kids start school and we start working again in September.

Now, taking a few weeks off and moving back home is very nice and all that, but we still need to have jobs, and this is where our relocation gets extra interesting as it seems that we’re moving home in multiple ways at once…

For once, my wife will start taking over the family business with the help of her dad in her home town of Lalín (Pontevedra), where we plan to be living for the foreseeable future. This is the place where she grew up and where her family and many friends live in, but also a place she hasn’t lived in for the last 15 years, so the fact that we’ll be relocating there is already quite a thing in the “moving back home” department for her…

Second, for my kids this will mean going back to having their relatives nearby once again as well as friends they only could see and play with during holidays until now, which I think it’s a very good thing for them. Of course, this doesn’t feel as much moving home for them as it does for us, since they obviously consider the UK their home for now, but our hope is that it will be ok in the medium-long term, even though it will likely be a bit challenging for them at the beginning.

Last, I’ll be moving back to work at Igalia after almost 6 years since I left which, as you might imagine, feels to me very much like “moving back home” too: I’ll be going back to working in a place I’ve always loved so much for multiple reasons, surrounded by people I know and who I consider friends already (I even would call some of them “best friends”) and with its foundations set on important principles and values that still matter very much to me, both from technical (e.g. Open Source, Free Software) and not so technical (e.g. flat structure, independence) points of view.

Those who know me better might very well think that I’ve never really moved on as I hinted in the title of the blog post I wrote years ago, and in some way that’s perhaps not entirely wrong, since it’s no secret I always kept in touch throughout these past years at many levels and that I always felt enormously proud of my time as an Igalian. Emmanuele even told me that I sometimes enter what he seems to call an “Igalia mode” when I speak of my past time in there, as if I was still there… Of course, I haven’t seen any formal evidence of such thing happening yet, but it certainly does sound like a possibility as it’s true I easily get carried away when Igalia comes to my mind, maybe as a mix of nostalgia, pride, good memories… those sort of things. I suppose he’s got a point after all…

So, I guess it’s only natural that I finally decided to apply again since, even though both the company and me have evolved quite a bit during these years, the core foundations and principles it’s based upon remain the same, and I still very much align with them. But applying was only one part, so I couldn’t finish this blog post without stating how grateful I am for having been granted this second opportunity to join Igalia once again because, being honest, more often than less I was worried on whether I would be “good enough” for the Igalia of 2018. And the truth is that I won’t know for real until I actually start working and stay in the company for a while, but knowing that both my former colleagues and newer Igalians who joined since I left trust me enough to join is all I need for now, and I couldn’t be more excited nor happier about it.

Anyway, this post is already too long and I think I’ve covered everything I wanted to mention On Moving (pun intended with my post from 2012, thanks Will Thompson for the idea!), so I think I’ll stop right here and re-focus on the latest bits related to the relocation before we effectively leave the UK for good, now that we finally left our rented house and put all our stuff in a removals van. After that, I expect a few days of crazy unpacking and bureaucracy to properly settle in Galicia and then hopefully a few weeks to rest and get our batteries recharged for our new adventure, starting soon in September (yet not too soon!).

As usual, we have no clue of how future will be, but we have a good feeling about this thing of moving back home in multiple ways, so I believe we’ll be fine as long as we stick together as a family as we always did so far.

It’s been a pretty hectic time during the past months for me here at Endless, busy with updating our desktop to the latest stable version of GNOME Shell (3.26, at the time the process started), among other things. And in all this excitement, it seems like I forgot to blog so I think this time I’ll keep it short for once, and simply link to a video I made a couple of months ago, right when I was about to finish the first phase of the process (which ended up taking a bit longer than expected).

Note that the production of this video is far from high quality (unsurprisingly), but the feedback I got so far is that it has been apparently very useful to explain to less technically inclined people what doing a rebase of this characteristics means, and with that in mind I woke up this morning realizing that it might be good to give it its own entry in my personal blog, so here it is.

Another year goes by and, again, I feel the call to make one more release just before 2017 over, so here we are: frogr 1.4 is out!

Yes, I know what you’re thinking: “Who uses Flickr in 2017 anyway?”. Well, as shocking as this might seem to you, it is apparently not just me who is using this small app, but also another 8,935 users out there issuing an average of 0.22 Queries Per Second every day (19008 queries a day) for the past year, according to the stats provided by Flickr for the API key.

Granted, it may be not a huge number compared to what other online services might be experiencing these days, but for me this is enough motivation to keep the little green frog working and running, thus worth updating it one more time. Also, I’d argue that these numbers for a niche app like this one (aimed at users of the Linux desktop that still use Flickr to upload pictures in 2017) do not even look too bad, although without more specific data backing this comment this is, of course, just my personal and highly-biased opinion.

So, what’s new? Some small changes and fixes, along with other less visible modifications, but still relevant and necessary IMHO:

Cleaned the code by finally migrating to using g_auto, g_autoptr and g_autofree.

Migrated to the meson build system, and removed all the autotools files.

Big update to translations, now with more than 22 languages 90% – 100% translated.

Also, this is the first release that happens after having a fully operational centralized place for Flatpak applications (aka Flathub), so I’ve updated the manifest and I’m happy to say that frogr 1.4 is already available for i386, arm, aarch64 and x86_64. You can install it either from GNOME Software (details on how to do it at https://flathub.org), or from the command line by just doing this:

Also worth mentioning that, starting with Frogr 1.4, I will no longer be updating my PPA at Launchpad. I did that in the past to make it possible for Ubuntu users to have access to the latest release ASAP, but now we have Flatpak that’s a much better way to install and run the latest stable release in any supported distro (not just Ubuntu). Thus, I’m dropping the extra work required to deal with the PPA and flat-out recommending users to use Flatpak or wait until their distro of choice packages the latest release.

After spending a few days in Manchester with other fellow GNOME hackers and colleagues from Endless, I’m finally back at my place in the sunny land of Surrey (England) and I thought it would be nice to write some sort of recap, so here it is:

The Conference

I arrived in Manchester on Thursday the 27th just on time to go to the pre-registration event where I met the rest of the gang and had some dinner, and that was already a great start. Let’s forget about the fact that I lost my badge even before leaving the place, which has to be some type of record (losing the badge before the conference starts, really?), but all in all it was great to meet old friends, as well as some new faces, that evening already.

Then the 3 core days of GUADEC started. My first impression was that everything (including the accommodation at the university, which was awesome) was very well organized in general, and the venue make it for a perfect place to organize this type of event, so I was already impressed even before things started.

I attended many talks and all of them were great, but if I had to pick my 5 favourite ones I think those would be the following ones, in no particular order:

The GNOME Way, by Allan: A very insightful and inspiring talk, made me think of why we do the things we do, and why it matters. It also kicked an interesting pub conversation with Allan later on and I learned a new word in English (“principled“), so believe me it was great.

Keynote: The Battle Over Our Technology, by Karen: I have no words to express how much I enjoyed this talk. Karen was very powerful on stage and the way she shared her experiences and connected them to why Free Software is important did leave a mark.

Continuous: Past, Present, and Future, by Emmanuele: Sometimes I talk to friends and it strikes me how quickly they dismiss things as CI/CD as “boring” or “not interesting”, which I couldn’t disagree more with. This is very important work and Emmanuele is kicking ass as the build sheriff, so his talk was very interesting to me too. Also, he’s got a nice cat.

The History of GNOME, by Jonathan: Truth to be told, Jonathan already did a rather similar talk internally in Endless a while ago, so it was not entirely new to me, but I enjoyed it a lot too because it brought so many memories to my head: starting with when I started with Linux (RedHat 5.2 + GNOME pre-release!), when I used GNOME 1.x at the University and then moved to GNOME 2.x later on… not to mention the funny anecdotes he mentioned (never imagined the phone ringing while sleeping could be a good thing). Perfectly timed for the 20th anniversary of GNOME indeed!

As I said, I attended other talks too and all were great too, so I’d encourage you to check the schedule and watch the recordings once they are available online, you won’t regret it.

And the next GUADEC will be in… Almería!

One thing that surprised me this time was that I didn’t do as much hacking during the conference as in other occasions. Rather than seeing it as a bad thing, I believe that’s a clear indicator of how interesting and engaging the talks were this year, which made it for a perfect return after missing 3 edition (yes, my last GUADEC was in 2013).

All in all it was a wonderful experience, and I can thank and congratulate the local team and the volunteers who run the conference this year well enough, so here’s is a picture I took where you can see all the people standing up and clapping during the closing ceremony.

Many thanks and congratulations for all the work done. Seriously.

The Unconference

After 3 days of conference, the second part started: “2 days and a bit” (I was leaving on Wednesday morning) of meeting people and hacking in a different venue, where we gathered to work on different topics, plus the occasional high-bandwith meeting in person.

As you might expect, my main interest this time was around GNOME Shell, which is my main duty in Endless right now. This means that, besides trying to be present in the relevant BoFs, I’ve spent quite some time participating of discussions that gathered both upstream contributors and people from different companies (e.g. Endless, Red Hat, Canonical).

This was extremely helpful and useful for me since, now we have rebased our fork of GNOME Shell 3.22, we’re in a much better position to converge and contribute back to upstream in a more reasonable fashion, as well as to collaborate implementing new features that we already have in Endless but that didn’t make it to upstream yet.

According to the designers this proposal was partially inspired by what we have in Endless, so you can imagine I would be quite happy to see such a plan move forward, as we could help with the coding side of things upstream while reducing our diff for future rebases. Thing is, this is a proposal for now so nothing is set in stone yet, but I will definitely be interested in following and participating of the relevant discussions regarding to this.

Second, as my colleague Georges already vaguely mentioned in his blog post, we had an improvised meeting on Wednesday with one of the designers from Red Hat (Jakub Steiner), where we discussed about a very particular feature upstream has wanted to have for a while and which Endless implemented downstream: management of folders using DnD, right from the apps view.

This is something that Endless has had in its desktop since the beginning of times, but the implementation relied in a downstream-specific version of folders that Endless OS implemented even before folders were available in the upstream GNOME Shell, so contributing that back would have been… “interesting”. But fortunately, we have now dropped that custom implementation of folders and embraced the upstream solution during the last rebase to 3.22, and we’re in a much better position now to contribute our solution upstream. Once this lands, you should be able to create, modify, remove and use folders without having to open GNOME Software at all, just by dragging and dropping apps on top of other apps and folders, pretty much in a similat fashion compared to how you would do it in a mobile OS these days.

We’re still in an early stage for this, though. Our current solution in Endless is based on some assumptions and tools that will simply not be the case upstream, so we will have to work with both the designers and the upstream maintainers to make this happen over the next months. Thus, don’t expect anything to land for the next stable release yet, but simply know we’ll be working on it and that should hopefully make it not too far in the future.

The Rest

This GUADEC has been a blast for me, and probably the best and my most favourite edition ever among all those I’ve attended since 2008. Reasons for such a strong statement are diverse, but I think I can mention a few that are clear to me:

From a personal point of view, I never felt so engaged and part of the community as this time. I don’t know if that has something to do with my recent duties in Endless (e.g. flatpak, GNOME Shell) or with something less “tangible” but that’s the truth. Can’t state it well enough.

From the perspective of Endless, the fact that 17 of us were there is something to be very excited and happy about, specially considering that I work remotely and only see 4 of my colleagues from the London area on a regular basis (i.e. one day a week). Being able to meet people I don’t regularly see as well as some new faces in person is always great, but having them all together “under the same ceilings” for 6 days was simply outstanding.

GNOME 20th anniversary dinner

Also, as it happened, this year was the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the GNOME project and so the whole thing was quite emotional too. Not to mention that Federico’s birthday happened during GUADEC, which was a more than nice… coincidence? 🙂 Ah! And we also had an incredible dinner on Saturday to celebrate that, couldn’t certainly be a better opportunity for me to attend this conference!

Last, a nearly impossible thing happened: despite of the demanding schedule that an event like this imposes (and I’m including our daily visit to the pubs here too), I managed to go running every single day between 5km and 10km, which I believe is the first time it happened in my life. I definitely took my running gear with me to other conferences but this time was the only one I took it that seriously, and also the first time that I joined other fellow GNOME runners in the process, which was quite fun as well.

Final words

I couldn’t finish this extremely long post without a brief note to acknowledge and thank all the many people who made this possible this year: the GNOME Foundation and the amazing group of volunteers who helped organize it, the local team who did an outstanding job at all levels (venue, accomodation, events…), my employer Endless for sponsoring my attendance and, of course, all the people who attended the event and made it such an special GUADEC this year.

We just released Endless OS 3.2 to the world after a lot of really hard work from everyone here at Endless, including many important changes and fixes that spread pretty much across the whole OS: from the guts and less visible parts of the core system (e.g. a newer Linux kernel, OSTree and Flatpak improvements, updated libraries…) to other more visible parts including a whole rebase of the GNOME components and applications (e.g. mutter, gnome-settings-daemon, nautilus…), newer and improved “Endless apps” and a completely revamped desktop environment.

By the way, before I dive deeper into the rest of this post, I’d like to remind you thatEndless OS is a Operating System that you can download for free from our website, so please don’t hesitate to check it out if you want to try it by yourself. But now, even though I’d love to talk in detail about ALL the changes in this release, I’d like to talk specifically about what has kept me busy most of the time since around March: the full revamp of our desktop environment, that is, our particular version of GNOME Shell.

Endless OS 3.2 as it looks in my laptop right now

If you’re already familiar with what Endless OS is and/or with the GNOME project, you might already know that Endless’s desktop is a forked and heavily modified version of GNOME Shell, but what you might not know is that it was specifically based on GNOME Shell 3.8.

Yes, you read that right, no kidding: a now 4 years old version of GNOME Shell was alive and kicking underneath the thousands of downstream changes that we added on top of it during all that time to implement the desired user experience for our target users, as we iterated based on tons of user testing sessions, research, design visions… that this company has been working on right since its inception. That includes porting very visible things such as the “Endless button”, the user menu, the apps grid right on top of the desktop, the ability to drag’n’drop icons around to re-organize that grid and easily manage folders (by just dragging apps into/out-of folders), the integrated desktop search (+ additional search providers), the window picker mode… and many other things that are not visible at all, but that are required to deliver a tight and consistent experience to our users.

Endless button showcasing the new “show desktop” functionality

Aggregated system indicators and the user menu

Of course, this situation was not optimal and finally we decided we had found the right moment to tackle this situation in line with the 3.2 release, so I was tasked with leading the mission of “rebasing” our downstream changes on top of a newer shell (more specifically on top of GNOME Shell 3.22), which looked to me like a “hell of a task” when I started, but still I didn’t really hesitate much and gladly picked it up right away because I really did want to make our desktop experience even better, and this looked to me like a pretty good opportunity to do so.

By the way, note that I say “rebasing” between quotes, and the reason is because the usual approach of taking your downstream patches on top of a certain version of an Open Source project and apply them on top of whatever newer version you want to update to didn’t really work here: the vast amount of changes combined with the fact that the code base has changed quite a bit between 3.8 and 3.22 made that strategy fairly complicated, so in the end we had to opt for a combination of rebasing some patches (when they were clean enough and still made sense) and a re-implementation of the desired functionality on top of the newer base.

The integrated desktop search in action

New implementation for folders in Endless OS (based on upstream’s)

As you can imagine, and especially considering my fairly limited previous experience with things like mutter, clutter and the shell’s code, this proved to be a pretty difficult thing for me to take on if I’m truly honest. However, maybe it’s precisely because of all those things that, now that it’s released, I look at the result of all these months of hard work and I can’t help but feel very proud of what we achieved in this, pretty tight, time frame: we have a refreshed Endless OS desktop now with new functionality, better animations, better panels, better notifications, better folders (we ditched our own in favour of upstream’s), better infrastructure… better everything!.

Sure, it’s not perfect yet (no such a thing as “finished software”, right?) and we will keep working hard for the next releases to fix known issues and make it even better, but what we have released today is IMHO a pretty solid 3.2 release that I feel very proud of, and one that is out there now already for everyone to see, use and enjoy, and that is quite an achievement.

Removing and app by dragging and dropping it into the trash bin

Now, you might have noticed I used “we” most of the time in this post when referring to the hard work that we did, and that’s because this was not something I did myself alone, not at all. While it’s still true I started working on this mostly on my own and that I probably took on most of the biggest tasks myself, the truth is that several other people jumped in to help with this monumental task tackling a fair amount of important tasks in parallel, and I’m pretty sure we couldn’t have released this by now if not because of the team effort we managed to pull here.

Last, before I finish this post, I’d just like to pre-answer a couple of questions that I guess some of you might have already:

Will you be proposing some of this changes upstream?

Our intention is to reduce the diff with upstream as much as possible, which is the reason we have left many things from upstream untouched in Endless OS 3.2 (e.g. the date/menu panel) and the reason why we already did some fairly big changes for 3.2 to get closer in other places we previously had our very own thing (e.g. folders), so be sure we will upstream everything we can as far as it’s possible and makes sense for upstream.

Actually, we have already pushed many patches to the shell and related projects since Endless moved to GNOME Shell a few years ago, and I don’t see any reason why that would change.

When will Endless OS desktop be rebased again on top of a newer GNOME Shell?

If anything we learned from this “rebasing” experience is that we don’t want to go through it ever again, seriously :-). It made sense to be based on an old shell for some time while we were prototyping and developing our desktop based on our research, user testing sessions and so on, but we now have a fairly mature system and the current plan is to move on from this situation where we had changes on top of a 4 years old codebase, to a point where we’ll keep closer to upstream, with more frequent rebases from now on.

Thus, the short answer to that question is that we plan to rebase the shell more frequently after this release, ideally two times a year so that we are never too far away from the latest GNOME Shell codebase.

And I think that’s all. I’ve already written too much, so if you excuse me I’ll get back to my Emacs (yes, I’m still using Emacs!) and let you enjoy this video of a recent development snapshot of Endless OS 3.2, as created by my colleague Michael Hall a few days ago:

Also, quick shameless plug just to remind you that we have an Endless Community website which you can join and use to provide feedback, ask questions or simply to keep informed about Endless. And if real time communication is your thing, we’re also on IRC (#endless on Freenode) and Slack, so I very much encourage you to join us via any of these channels as well if you want.

Ah! And before I forget, just a quick note to mention that this year I’m going to GUADEC again after a big break (my last one was in Brno, in 2013) thanks to my company, which is sponsoring my attendance in several ways, so feel free to say “hi!” if you want to talk to me about Endless, the shell, life or anything else.

This is mostly a small update to incorporate a bunch of updates in translations, a few changes aimed at improving the flatpak version of it (the desktop icon has been broken for a while until a few weeks ago) and to remove some deprecated calls in recent versions of GTK+.

Ah! I’ve also officially dropped support for OS X via gtk-osx, as I was systematically failing to update and use (I only use frogr from GNOME these days) since a loooong time ago, and so it did not make sense for me to keep pretending that the mac version is something that is usable and maintained anymore.

It’s been two years since the last time I went to FOSDEM, but it seems that this year I’m going to be there again and, after having traveled to Brussels a few times already by plane and train, this year I’m going by car!: from home to the Euro tunnel and then all the way up to Brussels. Let’s see how it goes.

As you might expect, I will have my Endless laptop with me while in the conference, so feel free to come and say “hi” in case you’re curious or want to talk about that if you see me around.

At the moment, I’m mainly focused on developing and improving our flatpak story, how we deliver apps to our users via this wonderful piece of technology and how the overall user experience ends up being, so I’d be more than happy to chat/hack around this topic and/or about how we integrate flatpak in EndlessOS, the challenges we found, the solutions we implemented… and so forth.

That said, flatpak is one of my many development hats in Endless, so be sure I’m open to talk about many other things, including not work-related ones, of course.

Now, if you excuse me, I have a bag to prepare, an English car to “adapt” for the journey ahead and, more importantly, quite some hours to sleep. Tomorrow it will be a long day, but it will be worth it.

Of course, just a few hours after releasing frogr 1.1, I’ve noticed that there was actually no good reason to depend on gettext 0.19.8 for the purposes of removing the intltool dependency only, since 0.19.7 would be enough.

One direct consequence is that you can now install the packages for Ubuntu from my PPA if you have Ubuntu Xenial 16.04 LTS or newer, instead of having to wait for Ubuntu Yakkety Yak (yet to be released). Other than that 1.2 is exactly the same than 1.1, so you probably don’t want to package it for your distro if you already did it for 1.1 without trouble. Sorry for the noise.

Besides, another significant difference compared to previous releases is related to the way I’m distributing it: in the past, if you used Ubuntu, you could configure my PPA and install it from there even in fairly old versions of the distro. However, this time that’s only possible if you have Ubuntu 16.10 “Yakkety Yak”, as that’s the one that ships gettext >= 0.19.8, which is required now that I removed all trace of intltool (more info in this post).

That said, it’s interesting that you also have the portal frontend service and a backend implementation, so that you can authorize your flickr account using the browser outside the sandbox, via the OpenURIportal. If you don’t have that at hand, you can still used the sandboxed version of frogr, but you’d need to copy your configuration files from a non-sandboxed frogr (under ~/.config/frogr) first, right into ~/.var/app/org.gnome.Frogr/config, and then it should be usable again (opening files in external viewers would not work yet, though!).

So this is all, hope it works well and it’s helpful to you. I’ve just finished uploading a few hundreds of pictures a couple of days ago and it seemed to work fine, but you never know… devil is in the detail!

I haven’t blogged in a while -mostly due to lack of time, as usual- but I thought I’d write something today to let the world know about one of the things I’ve worked on a bit during this week, while remotely attending the Web Engines Hackfest from home:

I know this is not new, nor ground-breaking news, but the truth is that I could not find any up-to-date documentation on the topic in a any public forum (the only one I found was this pretty old post from the time WebKitGTK+ used autotools), so I thought I would devote some time to it now, so that I could save more in the future.

Of course, I know for a fact that many people use local recipes to cross-compile WebKit2GTK+ for ARM (or simply build in the target machine, which usually takes a looong time), but those are usually ad-hoc things and hard to reproduce environments locally (or at least hard for me) and, even worse, often bound to downstream projects, so I thought it would be nice to try to have something tested with upstream WebKit2GTK+ and publish it on trac.webkit.org,

In my fast desktop machine I can now get a full build of WebKit2GTK+ 2.14 (or trunk) in less than 1 hour, which is pretty much a productivity bump if you compare it to the approximately 18h that takes if I build it natively in the target ARM device I have 🙂

Note that I’m not a CMake expert (nor even close) so the toolchain file is far from perfect, but it definitely does the job with both the 2.12.x and 2.14.x releases as well as with the trunk, so hopefully it will be useful as well for someone else out there.

While this might not seem to be an immediate need for Endless right now (we currently ship a Chromium-based browser as part of our OSTree based system), this was definitely something worth exploring as we are now implementing the next version of our App Center (which will be based on GNOME Software and xdg-app). Chromium updates very frequently with fixes and new features, and so being able to update it separately and more quickly than the OS is very valuable.

Screenshot of Endless OS’s current App Center

So, while Joaquim and Rob were working on the GNOME Software related bits and discussing aspects related to Continuous Integration with the rest of the crowd, I spent some time learning about xdg-app and trying to get Chromium to build that way which, unsurprisingly, was not an easy task.

Fortunately, the base documentation about xdg-app together with Alex Larsson’s blog post series about this topic (which I wholeheartedly recommend reading) and some experimentation from my side was enough to get started with the whole thing, and I was quickly on my way to fixing build issues, adding missing deps and the like.

Note that my goal at this time was not to get a fully featured Chromium browser running, but to get something running based on the version that we use use in Endless (Chromium 48.0.2564.82), with a couple of things disabled for now (e.g. chromium’s own sandbox, udev integration…) and putting, of course, some holes in the xdg-app configuration so that Chromium can access the system’s parts that are needed for it to function (e.g. network, X11, shared memory, pulseaudio…).

Of course, the long term goal is to close as many of those holes as possible using Portals instead, as well as not giving up on Chromium’s own sandbox right away (some work will be needed here, since `setuid` binaries are a no-go in xdg-app’s world), but for the time being I’m pretty satisfied (and kind of surprised, even) that I managed to get the whole beast built and running after 4 days of work since I started :-).

But, as Alberto usually says… “screencast or it didn’t happen!”, so I recorded a video yesterday to properly share my excitement with the world. Here you have it:

As mentioned above, this is work-in-progress stuff, so please hold your horses and manage your expectations wisely. It’s not quite there yet in terms of what I’d like to see, but definitely a step forward in the right direction, and something I hope will be useful not only for us, but for the entire Linux community as a whole. Should you were curious about the current status of the whole thing, feel free to check the relevant files at its git repository here.

Last, I would like to finish this blog post saying thanks specially to Richard Hughes for organizing this event, as well as the GNOME Foundation and Red Hat for their support in the development of GNOME Software and xdg-app. Finally, I’d also like to thank my employer Endless for supporting me to attend this hackfest. It’s been a terrific week indeed… thank you all!

I’ve just released frogr 1.0. I can’t believe it took me 6 years to move from the 0.x series to the 1.0 release, but here it is finally. For good or bad.

This release is again a small increment on top of the previous one that fixes a few bugs, should make the UI look a bit more consistent and “modern”, and includes some cleanups at the code level that I’ve been wanting to do for some time, like using G_DECLARE_FINAL_TYPE, which helped me get rid of ~1.7K LoC.

It will be different for me this time, though, as now my main focus won’t be on accessibility (yet I’m happy to help with that, too), but on fixing a few issues related to the WebKit2GTK+ API layer that I found while working on our platform (Endless OS), mostly related to its implementation of accelerated compositing.

Besides that, I’m particularly curious about seeing how the hackfest looks like now that it has broaden its scope to include other web engines, and I’m also quite happy to know that I’ll be visiting my home town and meeting my old colleagues and friends from Igalia for a few days, once again.

But as much as like Emacs as my main “weapon”, I sometimes appreciate the advantages of using a different kind of beast for specific purposes. And, believe me or not, in the past 2 years I learned to love Eclipse/CDT as the best work-mate I know when I need some extra help to get deep inside of the two monster C++ projects that WebKit and Chromium are. And yes, I know Eclipse is resource hungry, slow, bloated… and whatnot; but I’m lucky enough to have fast SSDs and lots of RAM in my laptop & desktop machines, so that’s not really a big concern anymore for me (even though I reckon that indexing chromium in the laptop takes “quite some time”), so let’s move on 🙂

…and then I simply import frogr-eclipse.xml from the project’s properties, inside the C/C++ General > Paths and Symbols section.

After doing that I get rid of all the brokenness caused by so many missing symbols and header files, I get code auto-completion nicely working back again and all those perks you would expect from this little big IDE. And all that without having to go through the pain of defining all of them one by one from the settings dialog, thank goodness!

I have a chrooted environment in my 64bit Fedora 22 machine that I use every now and then to work on a debian-like 32bit system where I might want to do all sorts of things, such as building software for the target system or creating debian packages. More specifically, today I was trying to build WebKitGTK+ 2.8.3 in there and something weird was happening:

The following CMake snippet was not properly recognizing my 32bit chroot:

Let’s avoid nasty comments about the stupid name of my machine (I’m sure everyone else uses clever names instead), and see what was there: x86_64.

That looked wrong to me, so I googled a bit to see what others did about this and, besides finding all sorts of crazy hacks around, I found that in my case the solution was pretty simple just because I am using schroot, a great tool that makes life easier when working with chrooted environments.

Because of that, all I would have to do would be to specify personality=linux32 in the configuration file for my chrooted environment and that’s it. Just by doing that and re-entering in the “jail”, the output would be much saner now:

As a long time Thinkpad’s trackpoint user and owner of a Lenovo T440s, I always felt quite frustrated with the clickpad featured in this laptop, since it basically ditched away all the physical buttons I got so used to, and replace them all with a giant, weird and noisy “clickpad”.

Fortunately, following Peter Hutterer’s post on X.Org Synaptics support for the T440, I managed to get a semi-decent configuration where I basically disabled any movement in the touchpad and used it three giant soft buttons. It certainly took quite some time to get used to it and avoid making too many mistakes but it was at least usable thanks to that.

Then, just a few months ago from now, I learned about the new T450 laptops and how they introduced again the physical buttons for the trackpoint there… and felt happy and upset at the same time: happy to know that Lenovo finally reconsidered their position and decided to bring back some sanity to the legendary trackpoint, but upset because I realized I had bought the only Thinkpad to have ever featured such an insane device.

Luckily enough, I recently found that someone was selling this T450’s new touchpads with the physical buttons in eBay, and people in many places seemed to confirm that it would fit and work in the T440, T440s and T440p (just google for it), so I decided to give it a try.

Initially, I thought of writing a detailed step by step guide on how to do the installation, but in the end it all boils down to removing the system board so that you can unscrew the old clickpad and screw the new one, so you just follow the steps in the T440s’s Hardware Maintenance Manual for that, and you should be fine.

If any, I’d just add that you don’t really need to remove the heatskink from the board, but just unplug the fan’s power cord, and that you can actually do this without removing the board completely, but just lifting it enough to manipulate the 2 hidden screws under it. Also, I do recommend disconnecting all the wires connected to the main board as well as removing the memory module, the Wifi/3G cards and the keyboard. You can probably lift the board without doing that, but I’d rather follow those extra steps to avoid nasty surprises.

Last, please remember that this model has a built-in battery that you need to disable from the BIOS before starting to work with it. This is a new step compared to older models (therefore easy to overlook) and quite an important one, so make sure you don’t forget about it!

Anyway, as you can see the new device fits perfectly fine in the hole of the former clickpad and it even gets recognized as a Synaptics touchpad, which is good. And even better, the touchpad works perfectly fine out of the box, with all the usual features you might expect: soft left and right buttons, 2-finger scrolling, tap to click…

The only problem is that the trackpoint’s buttons would not work that well: the left and right buttons would translate into “scroll up” and “scroll down” and the middle button would simply not work at all. Fortunately, this is also covered in Petter Hutterer’s blog, where he explains that all the problems I was seeing are expected at this moment, since some patches in the Kernel are needed for the 3 physical buttons to become visible via the trackpoint again.

But in any case, for those like me who just don’t care about the touchpad at all, this comment in the tracking bug for this issue explains a workaround to get the physical trackpoint buttons working well right now (middle button included), simply by disabling the Synaptics driver and enabling psmouse configured to use the imps protocol.

And because I’m using Fedora 21, I followed the recommendation there and simply added psmouse.proto=imps to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX line in /etc/default/grub, then run grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg, and that did the trick for me.

Now I went into the BIOS and disabled the “trackpad” option, not to get the mouse moving and clicking randomly, and finally enabled scrolling with the middle-button by creating a file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-trackpoint.conf (based on the one from my old x201), like this:

So that’s it. I suppose I will keep checking the status of the proper fix in the tracking bug and eventually move to the Synaptic driver again once all those issue get fixed, but for now this setup is perfect for me, and definitely way better than what I had before.

I only hope that I hadn’t forgotten to plug a cable when assembling everything back. At least, I can tell I haven’t got any screw left and everything I’ve tested seems to work as expected, so I guess it’s probably fine. Fingers crossed!

It’s been a while since I did this, but I got some people asking me lately about how exactly I did it and I thought it could be nice to write a post answering that question. Actually, it would be a nice thing for me to have anyway at least as “documentation”, so here it is.

But first of all, the idea: my personal and very particular goal was to have a proper SNES emulator plugged to my TV, based on the Raspberry Pi (simply because I had a spare one) that I could control entirely with a gamepad (no external keyboards, no ssh connection from a laptop, nothing).

Yes, I know there are other emulators I could aim for and even Raspberry specific distros designed for a similar purpose but, honestly, I don’t really care about MAME, NeoGeo, PSX emulators or the like. I simply wanted a SNES emulator, period. And on top of that I was quite keen on playing a bit with the Raspberry, so I took this route, for good or bad.

Anyway, after doing some investigation I realized all the main pieces were already out there for me to build such a thing, all that was needed was to put them all together, so I went ahead and did it. And these are the HW & SW ingredients involved in this recipe:

Once I got all these things around, this is how I assembled the whole thing:

1. Got the gamepad paired and recognized as a joystick under /dev/input/js0 using the QtSixA project. I followed the instructions here, which explain fairly well how to use sixpair to pair the gamepad and how to get the sixad daemon running at boot time, which was an important requirement for this whole thing to work as I wanted it to.

3. I had no idea how to get the PS3 gamepad paired automatically when booting the Raspberry Pi, so I wrote a stupid small script that would basically wait for the gamepad to be detected under /dev/input/js0, and then launch the snes9x.gui GUI to choose a game from the list of ROMS available. I placed it under /usr/local/bin/snes-run-gui, and looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
BASEDIR=/opt/pisnes
# Wait for the PS3 Game pad to be available
while [ ! -e /dev/input/js0 ]; do sleep 2; done
# The DISPLAY=:0 bit is important for the GUI to work
DISPLAY=:0 $BASEDIR/snes9x.gui

4. Because I wanted that script to be launched on boot, I simply added a line to /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE/autostart, so that it looked like this:

By doing the steps mentioned above, I got the following “User Experience”:

Turn on the RPi by simply plugging it in

Wait for Raspbian to boot and for the desktop to be visible

At this point, both the sixad daemon and the snes-run-gui script should be running, so press the PS button in the gamepad to connect the gamepad

After a few seconds, the lights in the gamepad should stop blinking and the /dev/input/js0 device file should be available, so snes9x.gui is launched

Select the game you want to play and press with the ‘X’ button to run it

While in the game, press the PS button to get back to the game selection UI

From the game selection UI, press START+SELECT to shutdown the RPi

Profit!

Unfortunately, those steps above were enough to get the gamepad paired and working with PiSNES, but my TV was a bit tricky and I needed to do a few adjustments more in the booting configuration of the Raspberry Pi, which took me a while to find out too.

So, here is the contents of my /boot/config.txt file in case it helps somebody else out there, or simply as reference (more info about the contents of this file in RPiConfig):

As you can imagine, some of those configuration options are specific to the TV I have it connected to (e.g. hdmi_mode), so YMMV. In my case I actually had to try different HDMI modes before settling on one that would simply work, so if you are ever in the same situation, you might want to apt-get installlibraspberrypi-bin and use the following commands as well:

I have to say I had great fun doing this and, even if it’s a quite hackish solution, I’m pretty happy with it because it’s been so much fun to play those games again, and also because it’s been working like a charm ever since I set it up, more than half a year ago.

And even better… turns out I got it working just in time for “Father’s Day”, which made me win the “best dad in the world” award, unanimously granted by my two sons, who also enjoy playing those good old games with me now (and beating me on some of them!).

Actually, that has been certainly the most rewarding thing of all this, no doubt about it.

Last weekend I visited my former office to attend the GStreamer hackfest 2015, along with other ~30 hackers from all over the world.

This was my very first GStreamer hackfest ever and it was definitely a great experience, although at the beginning I was really not convinced to attend since, after all, why bother attending an event about something I have no clue about?

But the answer turned out to be easy in the end, once I actually thought a bit about it: it would be a good opportunity both to learn more about the project and to meet people in real life (oldfriends included), making the most of it happening 15min away from my house. So, I went there.

And in the end it was a quite productive and useful weekend: I might not be an expert by now, but at least I broke the barrier of getting started with the project, which is already a good thing.

And even better, I managed to move forward a patch to fix a bug in PulseAudio I found on last December while fixing an downstream issue as part of my job at Endless. Back then, I did not have the time nor the knowledge to write a proper patch that could really go upstream, so I focused on fixing the problem at hand in our platform. But I always felt the need to sit down and cook a proper patch, and this event proved to be the perfect time and place to do that.

So, after neglecting my responsibilities with this project for way too long, I finally released frogr 0.11 now, making the most that I’m now enjoying some kind of “parenting vacation” for a few days.

Still, do not expect this new release to be fully loaded of new features and vast improvements, as it’s more like another incremental update that adds a couple of nice new things and fixes a bunch of problems I was really unhappy about (e.g. general slowness, crashes).

Wrapping it up, the main changes included with this release are:

Moved to the new GTK+’s header bar plus the typical menu button when GTK+ >= 3.12 (GTK+ 3.4 is still supported). I personally like this change a lot, as it makes frogr much more compact and sleek IMHO, and much better integrated with newer releases of GNOME.

Added a new option to automatically replace the “date posted” field in flickr with the “date taken” value from the EXIF metadata when uploading pictures. Useful to keep your photo stream sorted regardless of when you uploaded which pictures. Thanks a lot to Luc Pionchon for requesting this feature. I never thought of it before, now I use it all the time!

Sped up the load of pictures into the main window, as it was a very slow process when importing tags from the XMP keywords was enabled. I measured a 3x improvement, but YMMV.

Fixed random crashes due to the missing initialization of the gcrypt library introduced with the recent changes to use SSL API end points. Thanks a lot Andrés for your help with this!

Fixed issues related to the OS X port, which prevented frogr 0.9 from having video support and caused many problems with the 0.10 release. Now it should be fine, grab the bundle from here.

Other things: removed calls to deprecated APIs, updated translations, fixed a few minor bugs and a bit of a clean-up here and there, which is usually good.

As usual, feel free to check the website of the project in case you want to know more about frogr, how to get it or how to contribute to it. I’m having a hard time lately to find time to devote to this pet project, so any help anyone can provide will be more than welcome 🙂

By the way, I’m going to FOSDEM this year again, so feel free to say “hi” if you want to chat and/or share a beer (or more!).

I know I haven’t blogged for a while, and definitely not as much as I would like, but that was partially because I was quite busy during my last days in Samsung (left on the 25th of July), where I wanted to make sure I did not leave any loose end before departure, and that everything was properly handed over to the right people there.

But that was one month ago… so what did I do since then? Many many things, and most of them away from a keyboard, at least until the past week. Main highlights:

One week travelling by car with my family all the way down to Spain from the UK, through France, visiting all the nice places we could (and could afford) in the way, which was a lot of fun and an incredible experience.

The goal of taking the car to Spain was to sell it once we were there and, surprisingly enough, we did it in record time, so one thing less to worry about…

2 weeks in Spain having proper “relaxing holidays” to get some quality time off in between the two jobs, to properly recharge batteries. Not that the previous week was not holidays, but travelling 2200 km by car with two young kids on the back can be amazing and exhausting at the same time 🙂

1 week in the UK to make sure I had everything ready by the time I officially started in the new company, where I will initially be working from home: assemble a home office in my spare bedroom, and prepare my new laptop mainly. In the end, we (my wife helped me a lot) finished by Wednesday, so on Thursday we went for a last 2-day getaway to Wales (what a beautiful place!) by car, making the most that we were kids-free.

Therefore, as you can imagine, I didn’t have much time for blogging lately, but still I would like to share with the world my “change of affiliation” so here it is: since yesterday I’m officially part of the amazing team at Endless, an awesome start up from San Francisco committed to break the digital divide in the developing world by taking GNOME-based technology to the end users in ways that were not imaginable before. And I have to say that’s a vision I fell in love with since the very first time I heard about it (last year in Brno, during Matt’s keynote at GUADEC).

But just in case that was not awesome enough by itself, the other thing that made me fall in love with the company was precisely the team they have assembled, because even if I’m mostly a technical guy, I still value a lot the human side of the places I work in. And in this regard Endless seems to be perfect, or even better!

So, I’m extremely happy these days because of this new challenge I’m seeing in front of me, and because of the opportunity I’m being given to have a real positive impact in the lives of millions of people who still can’t access to technology as they should be able to do it. Also, I feel blessed and privileged for having been given the chance to be part of such an amazing team of people. Could not be happier at this time! 🙂

Last to finish this post, I would like to say thanks to my friend Joaquim, since he was who introduced me to Matt in the first place and “created” this opportunity for me. Thank you!